Junk Food

Senate Bill 19, introduced by Sen. Martha Escutia, D-Whittier, would limit the fat and sugar content in food served at schools. Student journalist Samantha MacLaren spoke to JOEL WARD, activities director at Lakewood High School in Long Beach. SB 19 is a good idea; it just has bad parts to it. And one of the bad parts is that it takes away authority that student associations have to sell food and beverage items.

MEXICO CITY - It may soon cost more to get fat in Mexico. New taxes on high-calorie junk food and sugary drinks were approved by Mexico's lower house of Congress in a marathon 18-hour session that ended Friday morning. They are part of a broader package of taxes and other fiscal changes proposed by President Enrique Peña Nieto aimed at generating nearly $20 billion for the national treasury. Mexico has one of the world's highest rates of obesity, recently surpassing the United States, and bigger price tags on chips, candy and other chatarra - or junk food - are being applauded by health experts.

At my Washington supermarket recently, 10 Twinkies cost $2.89 and 10 oranges were $1.99. You would have saved 90 cents, 1,000 calories and 60 grams of fat if you made oranges rather than Twinkies your afternoon snack. On the other hand, a serving of crinkle-cut French fries cost 10 cents last week, while an Idaho potato was about 25 cents. In this case, you would have saved money but certainly not fat if you went the French-fry route. What price junk food?

In written testimony to Congress, Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen said the satellite broacaster's controversial new commercial-skipping feature will help protect children from the marketing efforts of the fast food and alcohol industries. Called the "AutoHop," the feature on Dish's digitial video recorders allows its subscribers to avoid commercials on recorded shows from broadcast networks ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. Although consumers can already fast-forward through commercials on recorded shows, the AutoHop has caused concerns for the networks because it goes a step further.

February 6, 2012 | By Jeannine Stein, Los Angeles Times / For the Booster Shots blog

Think your kid isn't tempted by junk food while at school? A study finds that about half of kids surveyed from public and private school had ready access to vending machines, snack bars, school stores and a la carte lines. And they're not just selling carrot sticks. The study, released Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine , looked at the foods children had access to at various spots on campus during lunch time, in what they termed "competitive venues. " Researchers surveyed children at 2,647 public elementary schools and 1,205 public elementary schools from 2006 to 2010.

For a while in my late teens, long before I could have told you the difference between a quesadilla and a quenelle , I ate at Oki Dog more often than I did at home. About 1 in the afternoon, when the conceptual artist I worked for took the first of his habitual breaks for Rainier Ale and contemplation, I'd sneak out of his studio and walk to the Pico Boulevard Oki Dog, which was about two blocks away.

Junk food is everywhere. We're eating way too much of it. And we're getting fat. Most of us know what we're doing and yet we do it anyway. So here's a suggestion offered by two researchers at the Rand Corp.: Why not take a lesson from alcohol control policies and apply them to where food is sold and how it's displayed? “Many policy measures to control the obesity epidemic assume that people consciously and rationally choose what and how much they eat and therefore focus on providing information and more access to healthier foods,” note Dr. Deborah A. Cohen and Lila Rabinovich of Rand.

More than three-quarters of the nation's public elementary schools face no state or district limits on the sale of sugary drinks, candy or salty snacks, according to a survey. Children eat at least a third of their meals at school, and spend many waking hours there, the researchers noted in their study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. Pediatrics. At a time when about a third of children are overweight or obese, the researchers noted, those laws and regulations that do exist are meant to reduce children's access to junk food.

What to do about the obesity epidemic? Here's a thought: Substitute "tobacco" for "junk food." That provides a pretty clear road map about what government authorities should be doing to safeguard public health. Unfortunately, officials are instead just reheating the same old leftovers. Dietary guidelines issued recently by the U.S. Department of Agriculture basically say Americans need to ease up on the salt, sugar and saturated fats, and instead eat more fruits and veggies.

Superstar athletes Peyton Manning, LeBron James and Serena Williams led their colleagues with endorsements of food and beverages that are calorie-dense and unhealthful - sending mixed messages about diet and health, researchers said. Of 512 brands endorsed by 100 top athletes, nearly a quarter of them (122) were for food and beverages - 44 different brands in 2010, the year studied by researchers from Yale, Stanford, Duke and Harvard universities. (Some brands appeared more than once on the list.)